Review: Apocalyptic 'Year Zero' gets top marks

"Year Zero"
By Jeff Long
Pocket Books
Fiction
352 pages

(CNN) -- Here's a word you don't see very often in book reviews: Wow!

There's no other word for "Year Zero." It's an audacious, powerful and beautifully written novel that deals with issues of global scope. Author Jeff Long proves himself a storyteller of uncommon skill and breathtaking imagination.

The plot defies simple description, as the book defies easy categorization. The story encompasses virtually the entire world, yet focuses primarily on two people. They have little in common. Not even the catastrophe that is pushing the human race to the brink of extinction affects them the same way. What binds them is a trait of their characters. Each is searching for something.

Faith and questions

Nathan Lee Swift, an archaeologist, is looking for his daughter. Miranda Abbot, a teen-aged science prodigy, is looking for a cure to the bizarre plague that is sweeping around the world. It seems to have its roots in antiquity, perhaps among the bones of first-century crucifixion victims unearthed in Jerusalem -- not coincidentally by Nathan Lee.

Miranda is motivated in her search by an abiding belief that science and logic will unlock the mysteries of the plague. Nathan Lee is motivated by an abiding belief that his daughter Grace will grant him a form of redemption.

"He was ever mindful of Grace, ever," Long writes. "It wearied him, and his weariness felt like the worst betrayal. His quest had become a curse. His love had become a disease, or worse an abstraction. He loved his daughter because she had been his to love. Now he could not move ahead with or without her. Sometimes he could barely breathe."

Rich writing

As the story unfolds, the reader is drawn into a world that is familiar, yet totally alien. Long spreads his narrative from the ruins of the Holy Land to the peaks of the Himalayas, from a Greek island to a New Mexico mesa.

He introduces us to heroes and villains, though their actions are not always heroic or villainous. He creates a synthesis of genres -- a bit of medical thriller, a bit of science fiction, a little romance, a dash of action-adventure -- that stands as a literary entity unto itself. He is fearless in tackling thorny issues, ranging from matters of faith to the definition of life.

"Year Zero" is quite simply unlike any other book you'll read this year. It is as rich in pure story as it is in characterization, as daring in its plot as it is in examining the human condition pushed to its limits. With his fifth novel, Long firmly establishes himself as an author with something to say and an extraordinary gift for saying it.

In a word, "Wow!"